Painting Fakes

In previous posts I've talked about Jesus' inaugural sermon in Nazareth , where he reinterprets the Kingdom of God to include Israel's enemies; and the story of the cleansing of the Temple , in which Jesus symbolically clears the Court of the Gentiles for their expected influx.  In Luke 10:25-37 we find a story that reinforces these themes in a different way. 25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?” 27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” 28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.” 29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30 In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to J

So to continue where I left off yesterday .... While Mark and Matthew place this story late in Jesus ministry, John places it at the start.  It forms part of John's counterpart to Matthew and Mark's "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand", and Luke's story of Jesus preaching in Nazareth . John has two commencement stories.  The first, the story of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana, is not quite a public act, because although the wedding itself is a public event most of those present don't seem to know what has happened.  The story is also a deeply symbolic one.  The wine is symbolic of the life and vitality of the Kingdom of God.  Hence, when the original wine supplied for the wedding runs out, we should take this as indicating the bankruptcy of the old order, the order of priests and sacrifices which Jesus was confronting.  Jesus' response is to ask them to fill with water, and then draw from, the jars which the household woul

After my sermon on Jesus preaching at Nazareth some of us talked further on the question of how you should treat your enemies, if you're not supposed to kill them.  During this discussion we got onto the story of Jesus clearing the temple and I thought it would be worth a closer look. The story appears in three of the gospels.  In Mark 11:15-19 and Matthew 21:12-17 it comes in the final week of Jesus' life, right after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  In John 2:12-25 it plays a somewhat similar role to the story of Jesus in Nazareth in Luke, a public introduction to the purpose of his ministry.  I have read some commentators who think this means Jesus did it twice, but this seems to be an absurd concession to the idea of inerrancy .  John has placed the story in a different place but it serves the same purpose - to introduce Jesus' terminal conflict with the Jewish authorities. Here is the story as it appears in Mark. On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temp

So, to continue from Part 1 ... One of the things that many of the writers on the life of Jesus agree on - including Albert Schweitzer , Albert Nolan and NT Wright - is that Jesus was a prophet of the "end times", that the core of his message was that a crisis was coming and they needed to get ready.  This is shown in the way Jesus begins his public ministry in all four Gospels.  Matthew and Mark begin with a summary statement: "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand."  The first public acts of Jesus in John's gospel are the changing of water into wine, symbolising renewal, and the cleansing of the temple, which presents a clear challenge to the Jewish authorities to reform or be destroyed.  Likewise, the scene in Luke 4:16-30 shows Jesus announcing that the prophecy of the coming kingdom was in the process of fulfillment, and talking about what sort of kingdom it would be. It didn't take any special message from God to know that a crisis was loo

Next Sunday I get to do one of my rare preaching gigs.  The first for a long time and for perhaps the first time ever at St Andrews I get to choose the topic.  So I thought that all this reading of Lives of Jesus has to be good for something and I'm planning a talk on the story in Luke 4:14-30.   Jesus preaches for the first (and possibly only) time in the synagogue at Nazareth.  So I thought I'd try out my thoughts here and see if they make sense.  This is Part 1 - Part 2 is here . First, here's the passage. Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country.  He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.  When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read,and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

So I was sitting in Church last Sunday, as you do, and we read the passage from John's Gospel, Chapter 4, where Jesus has a conversation with a Samaritan woman at the well outside the town of Sychar.  The sermon has completely gone from my head, as most aural communication tends to, but I was struck by part of the story. Jesus starts by asking the woman for a drink, and she is amazed that a Jewish man will ask a Samaritan woman for water - crossing racial and gender barriers was a bit of a shock back then.  Then they have a complex conversation about living water which seems to be a metaphor for eternal life, and the woman asks Jesus to give her this life.  Having got to that point, they address two issues - her sexual morality, and the difference in doctrine between Jews and Samaritans.  Here's the first part. 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” 16 He told her, “Go, call your husban

It's nearly Christmas.  Most of us are getting ready to hang out with our extended family, while those of us who are a long way from family are most likely lining up surrogates to stave off the loneliness.  This has come to be what Christmas is about for most Australians.  So with that in mind, here's a little Christmas gem from Kenneth Bailey's marvellous book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes . In our traditional view of the Christmas story, based on Luke 2:1-7, Joseph and Mary set off for Bethelehem.  When they arrive, however, the inn is full and they are forced to sleep out in the stable, where Jesus is born.  The story has become a symbol of Jesus' poverty and his status as a social outcast.  In Bailey's view it is also very European, and is a very unlikely scenario in the context of Middle Eastern culture.  Firstly, Joseph was a descendent of David, going to the City of David.  Hence he almost certainly had relatives in town and these would have been hono

This morning in church we read the story of Jesus healing the centurion's slave from Luke 7:1-10.  I found it hard to listen to the sermon because I kept being distracted by the story.  Here's what was distracting me. This story takes place in the village of Capernaum and has three main characters - the centurion's slave, the centurion himself, and Jesus.  The slave is the trigger for the story: ...a centurion's servant, whom his master valued highly, was sick and about to die. Other translations say that the slave "was dear to him".  There's some ambiguity here - was the slave a loved member of his household, or a valuable piece of property?  Either way, what follows in the story indicates that when Jesus is asked to heal this slave it is not seen as an act of service towards the slave, but towards the centurion himself. This is not surprising when you think of who the centurion was.  He was a Roman army officer, roughly equivalent to a captain

I'm really enjoying Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes by Kenneth Bailey. Here's one of the little pieces in it that really struck me. I wrote a while ago about the message of the book of Ruth being that the law should be interpreted generously and inclusively, and that being about David's ancestors this story provided a model for the governing of Israel. Bailey draws attention to a similar story about David's descendent Joseph in Matthew 1:18-19. His (Jesus') mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Because her husband was a righteous (or "just") man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly. This was not just tact. The Old Testament punishment for a woman caught in adultery was stoning to death, and John 8:1-11 shows this was still practiced in the first century. Joseph, knowing that he's not the father of

Happy Christmas Everyone! Since it's Christmas and I've been reading a book on religious philosophy, here's a Christmas thought. We're told that Jesus was born to Mary even though she was a virgin. That is to say, she had never had sex, and so no sperm had ever entered her uteris to fertilise the egg. Yet the teaching of the church (both Protestant and Catholic) is that Jesus was fully human - hence that he grew from an embryo into a human baby like the rest of us. Now we know that in normal circumstances an unfertilised egg is barren - it doesn't divide and grow, it just decomposes. We also know that even if it did begin to grow of its own accord, unfertilised, the outcome would be a girl, since it is the man who provides the Y chromosome. So, in the absence of male sperm, how did her egg get fertilised, and the required male DNA enter the ovum? This problem leads sceptics, particularly those of a scientific persuasion, to dismiss this story as a "mere myt